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Quotes

Why bother to try to express something wise, witty or enlightening? Someone's already done it. I'll be adding to these quotations as I remember or discover them.

"Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable so much as to conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo."

From the preface his essay, Man and the Sea Shell - Paul Valéry (1871-1945)

"... there is a strong tendency for us to over-commit the future, so that when the future becomes present we seem to be conscious all the time of having an acute scarcity, simply because we have committed ourselves to about thirty hours a day instead of twenty-four."

"... now we come to religion, and an extremely odd thing happens. Where we might have said, 'knowing his father, I expect young Cowdrey will take up cricket,' we emphatically do not say, 'With her devout Catholic parents, I expect young Bernadette will take up Catholicism.' Instead we say, without a moment's hesitation or a qualm of misgiving, 'Bernadette is a Catholic'. We state it as simple fact even when she is far too young to have developed a theological opinion of her own."

"I don't accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view. My view is that the moon is made of rock. If someone says to me, 'Well, you haven't been there, have you? You haven't seen for yourself, so my view that it is made of Norwegian beaver cheese is equally valid' - then I can't even be bothered to argue. There is such as thing as the burden of proof, and in the case of god, as in the case of the composition of the moon, this has shifted radically. God used to be the best explanation we've got, and we've now got vastly better ones. God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining. So I don't think that being convinced that there is no god is as irrational or arrogant a point of view as belief that there is. I don't think the matter calls for even-handedness at all."

Douglas Adams, in an interview with American Atheists from 'The Salmon of Doubt' (collected writing, published posthumously).

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea..."

Douglas Adams, 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy '.

Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore,
And that's what parents were created for.

"I had insisted on half women on board [the Enterprise]. The network came to me and said, 'You can't have half women. Our people say it will make it look like a ship with all sorts of mad sexual things going on - half men and half women.' So we argued about it like a poker game and they finally said, 'Okay. We'll settle for one-third women.' I figured one-third women could take care of the males anyway."

Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, talking about an argument with the TV network bosses.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."